The Return
by RangerGirl
Summary: When the Enterprise suffers a horrific attack, help comes from an unlikely source. But what exactly is Khan's agenda? Set soon post-STID.
1. Chapter 1

So far, the whole 'five-year exploration' thing is working out exactly as Kirk hoped.

When he'd committed to the mission, he'd never admitted that the main reason it appealed to him was its relative safety. Near death experiences were one thing; those he could coast through on adrenalin and turn into killer anecdotes to tell over a beer. Actual death, as it turned out, had been less easy to shake off.

He'd never admit it. And he's choosing to believe that his crew don't know it, although Spock's gaze lingers on him for just a little too long now and Uhura's gentle with him in a way she never used to be and Bones is always naming some new reason to check him over in the infirmary.

He fakes it as hard as he can, does the whole gung-ho smirk thing and flirts ostentatiously with Carol and keeps his hands steady, absolutely steady, even when he walks through Engineering and sees the radiation chamber, that glass pane, hears the warp core thrumming within.

This has made him hate the heart of his own ship, and that just might be the worst part of it.

Still, the mission has been going smoothly. The first week they'd landed on what appeared to be an uninhabited planet, and discovered some kind of micro-organism that made Spock about as outwardly excited as was possible.

It hasn't been thrilling but it's been exactly the break he wanted, and when he wakes up shuddering now, he can force himself to relax by mentally recounting the logs from their exploratory missions to date, the findings, the planet coordinates. And it helps.

Things have been good.

Until today.

The first sign that something is wrong is a low whining noise somewhere overhead, so low he thinks he could be imagining things. Bones still has him on a litany of meds, which he mostly remembers to take.

"Do you hear that?" he asks Chekhov, who's squinting intently at his monitor.

"What, captain?"

"That–"

Abruptly, the lights go out. The bridge is plunged into darkness, possibly the entire ship along with it and that just shouldn't be possible, he's thinking to himself, the backup systems should have kicked in the same instant the power failed.

"Mr Scott!" he shouts, stabbing at his comm. "What the hell is going on down here?"

The monitors have all gone dead, too. They are flying blind. There's no response from Scotty.

"Well, this is just great," he mutters, as panicked voices grow gradually louder around him. "Okay, everyone, stay calm, this is probably–"

Before he can finish the sentence, he's thrown forwards by a blast that rips through the wall behind him, taking out an entire section of controls. Grenade fire, he recognizes, even as his cheek connects hard with the floor.

"Jesus Christ," he mutters, and reaches blindly for his phaser, tasting his own blood.

Through the darkness he can make out a group of stocky figures now, twenty at least, and something in his bones identifies them before his brain catches up, a chill moving down his spine.

He throws himself sideways as another blast hits, and he's winded as he lands, head spinning. _Get on your feet_, he thinks, and staggers upward but his legs are like jelly and won't hold him. Behind him, he hears someone screaming over and over again, a siren rhythm.

The Klingons are advancing, and he fires clumsily into the darkness, ducking behind a console for cover. He can't bring himself to look down, knows there's a body at his five o'clock and he can't. He can't.

He fires again and one of the Klingons drops. Three more have been taken out by somebody he can't see firing from the opposite side, but there are so many more than he realized, Jesus, they brought an army. Turns out there really are consequences to walking into Klingon airspace and leaving a body count behind you.

A gun blast lands just shy of his head and he ducks down, trying desperately to run a mental inventory, who else was on the bridge? How many?

"SPOCK," he yells hoarsely, seeing a flash of blue somewhere ahead, but there's no reply and now four Klingons are bearing down on him, suddenly, hissing angry clipped words he doesn't understand.

He raises his phaser, manages to hit one before another fires and hits him in the shoulder. The joint explodes with white-hot pain, and he's not even sure if he's screaming out loud, the air is so full of smoke and noise.

One of the Klingons is picking him up by the neck now, and God just let it be over, just do it. But it seems intent on telling Kirk exactly why he's about to die, even as his vision's turning grey around the edges and all he can hear is buzzing in his ears.

His airways are closing up entirely now, unnaturally strong fingers crushing his windpipe and he can't breathe at all. He'd almost drowned once, reckless in white-water rapids during a family vacation in California, and he wonders dimly if choking to death will feel the same, the slow weight descending into his chest.

His mother's face is all he sees, suddenly, and he hears gunfire again but it's far away, and he's falling.

But he hits the ground, hard, and suddenly there's air.

"Move aside, Captain," a deep voice shouts, and he forces his eyes open and tries to focus. _What?_

Khan is standing there, hair wild and eyes calm, as deadly calm as the first time Kirk saw him, and he's holding a weapon Kirk doesn't recognise.

He gasps for air, heaving, his shoulder throbbing.

"Move aside," Khan orders again, and Kirk ducks and rolls as fast as he can as Khan opens fire.

He keeps rolling until he connects with something soft, blue material and God, please, no.

"Spock," he wheezes, breath still rattling. "Spock?" He can't see his face. Please.

"I am fine, Captain," comes the familiar voice, ragged but coherent, and Kirk slumps sideways feeling weak and grateful, lets his head rest against Spock's side.

"You're bleeding," he says, feeling warmth under his right hand.

"A superficial wound. You have also sustained an injury."

"Yeah, I'd noticed."

Behind them, Khan is taking down Klingon after Klingon in a dance so assured it looks choreographed, and they stay still, dumbly taking in the déjà vu.

"The others?" Kirk chokes out.

"I am not sure. Doctor Marcus was injured in the first blast. I was attempting to move her to safety when the second hit."

Kirk remembers the siren screams he'd heard and feels sick.

Khan is still working his way through the Klingon forces like it's nothing, and they're starting to thin out, he thinks, he prays. _What the hell is Khan doing on the ship?_

"I am assuming," comes Spock's voice, as if he had read Kirk's mind, "that Khan has been a stowaway on the Enterprise ever since we left San Francisco."

_Logical_, Kirk thinks, but only nods. His throat has closed up, thinking of the dead. There will be dead.

Khan pivots on his heel one last time, kicks one Klingon squarely in the face as he hits another with phaser fire over his shoulder, snaps its neck and then finally, there are no more.

Silence.

Except for the whimpers, the low hum of collective pain that is suddenly deafening in Kirk's ears. He can't bring himself to move, his shoulder still on fire.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"Acting as your bodyguard, it would seem," Khan spits, kicking aside a Klingon corpse and advancing. Kirk raises his phaser instinctively, Spock stiffening beside him.

"Stay right there," he cautions.

"Captain, given what you've just witnessed and your current physical state, do you imagine it's wise to threaten me?"

He feels Spock try to rise, tremble with an involuntary gasp of pain and fall back.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Khan says, a hint of exasperation in his voice.

"Hurt us? You've already killed me once," Kirk explodes, the ludicrous intensity of the situation making his voice high, hysterical.

"Now isn't the time to dwell on the past, Captain. Tend to your fallen family."

And suddenly Spock is moving, saying "Nyota" in a haunted voice and Kirk sees her, pale and broken-looking against a console.

The lights are back on, he realises.

Blood. Blood is everywhere, and the smell of burning skin, and finally the body he's been avoiding is beneath his hands, and it's Chekhov. Half his torso blasted away, his face intact, serene.

Kirk shakes, too hard even to hold himself up, and collapses sideways onto one arm. Closes Chekhov's eyelids with the other hand, stifling a scream. Gathers himself to look around the bridge, properly.

And wishes he hadn't.


	2. Chapter 2

Nineteen dead.

Among them, Chekov and Carol.

Bones has wrapped a tourniquet around his shoulder until the casualties can be triaged.

He'd tried to follow as Bones and Scotty walked past him, faces grim and set, bracing themselves to identify the dead.

"Jim, you've got a gaping shoulder wound and a concussion. Just sit still."

And so he watches numbly as Chekhov is lifted onto a black stretcher, as Bones takes Carol's pulse and his face falls, twisting for a second in despair.

Uhura is being stretchered towards the infirmary, Spock beside her. He's still bleeding, a hand pressed against his side, and Kirk realises that Bones has not noticed.

"Spock," he starts, lurching towards him. "Is she okay?"

"I believe so," Spock says after a moment, and his voice is steady but Kirk has seen that look in his eyes before, and aches. "She was conscious. I need to go with her to the infirmary to establish–"

"You need to get stitched up before you go anywhere," Kirk says, relieved at the chance to lead again. "Just wait for Bones. Please."

Spock doesn't protest, his gaze fixed suddenly on a point somewhere beyond Kirk, and he turns.

Khan is standing against the wall, watching the proceedings with no apparent reaction. Spock, on the other hand, has rarely looked more vicious.

"Why are you here?" he asks, voice low.

"You have more urgent concerns, Mr Spock."

"I must disagree. The timing of your arrival, coinciding as it did with that of the Klingon battalion, is among the most pressing of my current concerns."

"What are you suggesting?"

"I am suggesting that this is not the first time you have joined forces with the Klingons," Spock says steadily, advancing towards Khan with eyes dark.

"And what do you imagine either I or the Klingons would stand to gain from a plan that involved me single-handedly laying waste to their army?"

"I don't pretend to understand what motivates a mind like yours. But I can understand how it might be beneficial to ingratiate yourself with this crew by appearing to provide timely rescue."

"Oh, yes," Khan drawls. "I regained the trust of the Klingons – whose ranks I decimated once before mere weeks ago on Kronos, as you will both recall – enlisted them to attack this ship, and threw myself headlong into battle with them while you all cowered behind me. All this, I did solely to gain your hard-won approval. Does that sound logical to you, Mr Spock?"

"Why, then, did you help us?"

"More to the point, how the hell did you get on the ship?" Kirk asks.

"It was less of a challenge than you might like to think, Captain. Security measures are curiously lax if one knows the right cargo entrance to watch."

"You were inside a cryo-pod. Sealed. At Starfleet."

Khan doesn't answer, and suddenly Kirk realises he doesn't especially care. So he escaped. Sure. Why not?

From the corner of his eye, he sees Carol zipped into a body bag. He puts his head in his hands, nausea coming in trembling waves.

"So you claim you were unaware that the Klingon attack was coming?" Spock asks from somewhere above him.

"You and your employers might be too arrogant to imagine that war could possibly come unless you yourselves declared it. But I've known ever since Kronos that there would be consequences," Khan says. "I had no prior knowledge of the specific attack. That it came today was merely convenient."

He hears a scuffing sound, a dull thud, and when he looks up Spock has Khan in a Vulcan nerve pinch against the wall, choking him with the other hand.

"You would be unwise to describe the events of today in those terms again," he snarls, and as Khan yells out in pain Kirk wonders at what has been unleashed in Spock, so swiftly.

"Spock," he tries weakly, concerned for the wound still bleeding steadily from below his ribs.

But Khan recovers, delivering a sucker punch to Spock's injured side and as Spock crumples, Khan doesn't let him fall.

"Kirk," he bites out, holding Spock up with one hand. "Attend to your first officer, if you would."

But before Kirk can get upright Bones is there, shoving Khan viciously back and guiding Spock down to the floor.

"Damnit, you could have mentioned this earlier," he mutters as he tears open his uniform, exposing charred skin, and Spock is unresponsive. The blood loss has finally taken him.

Kirk watches Bones work, green blood dripping over his hands, caught in the gaze. He needs to do something. Lead. If only his goddamn head would stop spinning long enough for him to stand up properly.

"Sir? What do you want done with the prisoner?"

He looks round.

Four officers have Khan handcuffed between them, and a fifth is looking expectantly down at Kirk.

"Take him back to the holding cell, for now."

He's back on Spock's blood, watching it pool slower and slower as Bones stitches his wound with deft, precise movements, his hands perfectly steadily.

The blood.

Jesus, he hasn't been thinking.

"Wait," he shouts, and the officers pause at the doorway, Khan halting first almost as though he knew the order was coming.

"Sir?"

"His blood," Kirk says, his own voice loud in his ears as he moves over to them. "His blood, it can bring them back. Everyone. None of this–" and he's laughing, suddenly, hysteria and so, so much relief, "none of this happened. We can bring them back."

There's silence, all five officers looking blankly at him and do they not know? Maybe not.

"Bones, how much of his blood did it take to bring me back?"

"Little under two pints in a transfusion," Bones answers, voice tight, eyes still fixed on his work.

"So, okay, so that's six people right there," Kirk calculates, _ten to twelve pints of blood in the average human_, yes, he knows this, this will work, "and he must regenerate blood cells way faster than normal, it's not like we're gonna have to wait long."

He turns wildly, sees Scotty in the distance looking sick, struggling with the zip on another body bag.

"Scotty, it's okay! Just… all we need to do is keep them cold, for the next few hours, just preserve them and we can bring them back. We can bring them back," he repeats, a mantra, _yes yes yes_.

"No. You can't."

"We're not giving you a choice," Kirk snaps.

"I am not referring to my own resistance. My blood will not bring back your fallen crew."

Khan's voice is like a lead weight in his stomach, dragging.

"What, you don't have enough? Fuck you, you're indestructible, you can't replenish your own blood cells?"

"You could drain me dry a hundred times over and it would not bring them back," Khan says, his voice utterly flat.

There's bile rising in his throat.

"You're lying."

Khan rolls up his sleeve, extends his arm.

"You're more than welcome to try."

Before Kirk can respond, Bones is at his elbow.

"I can't do this here. I need him hooked up to a blood bag."

And already he's shepherding the five officers and Khan out of the wrecked bridge, towards the infirmary and Kirk is left to trail behind, repeating the same thought to himself over and over because nothing else makes sense.

_This will work._


End file.
